We're having a bad week here of rather mythic proportions, so it's time to distract myself with talk of politics.
Continuing our discussion of what's wrong with the Democratic Party, Atlantic Monthly has a multi-book review along those lines. Three recent books attempt some analysis of why the Democrats can't win an election: Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, and Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture.
Mark Cooper, the review author, goes to town on latte-sipping, self-indulgent, elitist, narrow minded liberal Democrats who go around seeing themselves as "a persecuted minority, bravely shielding the flickering flame of enlightenment from the increasing Christo-Republican darkness..."
He pans the Ladoff book.
Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, "Don't Think of an Elephant!" is a feel-good self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their commonsense message has been misunderstood by the eternally deceived masses. Liberal values are American values, they say, but somehow Americans just keep getting tricked--by Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, AM talk radio, conservative think tanks -- into thinking and voting against their own interests.
The Frank book gets a much better rating, but Cooper prefers the harsher criticisms of liberal Democrats that Frank has made elsewhere.
In a February 2004 essay in the obscure "Le Monde Diplomatique", Frank mercilessly attacked aloof, self-absorbed liberals. "Leftists of these tendencies aren't really interested in the catastrophic decline of the American left as a social force... If anything, this decline makes sense to them: the left is people in sympathy with the downtrodden, not the downtrodden themselves. It is a charity operation."
And in a post-election piece in the "The New York Times," Frank concluded that the Democrats "lost the battle of voter motivation before it started," by choosing high-profile assistance from "idealistic tycoons" overa more natural class-based alliance with common people. As a result, "they imagined themsleves the 'metro' party of cool billionaires engaged in some kind of cosmic combat with the square billionaires of the 'retro' Republican party."
There is no doubt that elitism and snobbery is one factor that explains the teetering Democratic party. Perhaps it is a huge factor. However, other forces are at work as well, which hopefully I'll blog about more in the next couple of weeks. (I'm going to try to stay on topic for a change.)